Because of the chemical flexibility and broad range of applications of hydrogels, the direct patterning of biocompatible gel structures certainly deserves to be fully explored. This paper describes a method of creating hydrogel patterns of poly(acrylamide) by soft lithography. Room-temperature moulding is employed in order to directly transfer microstructures into poly(acrylamide), in a parallel manner up to a resolution of 2 μm. During the imprinting process, the gel at the liquid state flows into the shape of the stamp, driven by a combination of spontaneous capillarity and pressure-induced transport, without using any photon-beam, solvent, and chemical surface treatment. After the polymerization of the system, a negative copy of the stamp pattern is therefore frozen on the target material surface. © 2005 IOP Publishing Ltd.

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